NASA’s Office of Education will award more than $17.3 million through the National Space Grant and Fellowship Program to increase student and faculty engagement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at community colleges and technical schools across the U.S. Each award has a two-year performance period and a maximum value of $500,000. The 35 awards were granted after a solicitation to members of the national Space Grant Consortia. Winning proposals outlined ways to attract and retain more students from community and technical colleges in STEM curricula, develop stronger collaborations to increase student access to NASA’s STEM education content, and increase the number of students who advance from an associate to a bachelor’s degree.

The INSGC Community College Partnership (INCCP) program represents an unprecedented partnership between the Indiana Space Grant Consortium, Ivy Tech Community College, and Vincennes University. Purdue University Professor Barrett Caldwell heads the Consortium. Both Ivy Tech Community College and Vincennes University operate multiple Indiana campuses with unique strengths tied to local communities and industries. A total of six community college campus sites (four Ivy Tech and two Vincennes) will participate in this partnership, representing a variety of STEM Domain Areas suited to the local Economic and Workforce Emphases of major industry needs of those regions.

“Our focus is on a broad conceptualization of student success, including effective recruitment, retention, mentoring, and completion of Associate’s Degrees in STEM fields, while enabling students to make suitable choices between STEM workforce employment and low-risk transfer to four-year STEM university programs,” according to Prof. Caldwell. INCCP will target 10 students per region per year, resulting in at least 60 community college students per year obtaining significant STEM scholarship and workforce development experiences. Although students will be eligible to participate in a second year of activity, it is expected that at least 15 Year 1 participants will transition to a STEM workforce position or transfer to a four-year institution. Those completed students will be replenished with 15 more students recruited during Year 1 for Year 2 activity.

Do you have what it takes to create the next big idea? Is your creative genius aspiring to unfold? Bright House Networks is proud to present Bright Ideas STEM from Today’s Youth, a multi-state competition where high school students dream up the coolest inventions to make their own life, community or even the world, more awesome… and show how STEM – that’s science, technology, engineering and math, can bring their idea to life. The new Bright Ideas STEM from Today’s Youth program will award one student (or team of students) the opportunity to work with a lead innovation firm – which means this student’s dream or idea could potentially be realized and fulfilled!

Bright Ideas STEM from Today’s Youth is open to all high school students who are at least 14 years old as of the date of entry and who attend a public, private or parochial high school within a Bright House Networks service area. Students will be able to compete as individuals or as part of a team. Teams who enter will be required to assign an ownership stake (from 1 to 100%) to each team member for the entry submitted.

Ultimately, Gov. Bill Haslam will be the one graded on making headway with his cornerstone education initiative, but Mike Krause is tasked with leading the way.

Since June, Krause has crisscrossed Tennessee — just last week, he met with 61 local school districts — as the new executive director of Drive to 55, Haslam’s highly touted initiative to increase the state’s percentage of college graduates from around 33 percent today to 55 percent by 2025.

The governor’s appointment of the 32-year-old Krause, a former member of the 101st Airborne Division and Cookeville native who had already been working on college attainment at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, received universal praise within education circles.

Twenty-six states have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. The goal, officials say, will be to teach students a new way of scientific thinking in which the focus will be less on what they know and more on how they conduct questioning and learn. Education leaders in Delaware and the 25 other states that have signed onto the standards hope they will fundamentally transform how science is taught.

In an age when almost everyone has the Internet nestled in their pocket, memorizing facts is less useful, they argue. “When you work as a scientist, or an engineer, or whatever you do, it isn’t all about what you know. Companies are trying to find people who can innovate, who can solve problems, who can come up with new ideas,” said Ross Armbrecht, a former DuPont engineer and current executive director of the Delaware Foundation for Science and Mathematics Education. “This requires a fundamental rethinking of how we teach.” Next Gen requires students to master a tightened list of essential concepts – in the lingo of the standards, “disciplinary core ideas.”

The shortage of job candidates who have STEM skills has grown so pronounced that, by one prominent measuring stick, high school grads with STEM backgrounds are now in higher demand in the job market than college graduates who don’t have STEM skills. That’s a key finding of a new Brookings Institution report, “Still Searching: Job Vacancies and STEM Skills.” The report’s author, Brookings analyst Jonathan Rothwell, says the study found that STEM job openings requiring only a high school diploma or college associate degree take an average of 40 days to fill, whereas non-STEM job openings that require a bachelor’s degree take an average of 37 days to fill. The data also show that manufacturing companies have greater difficulty filling STEM job vacancies than other types of businesses.

The new math of the ‘60s, the new new math of the ‘80s and today’s Common Core math all stem from the idea that the traditional way of teaching math simply does not work. As a nation, we suffer from an ailment that John Allen Paulos, a Temple University math professor and an author, calls innumeracy — the mathematical equivalent of not being able to read. On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.

Gov. Terry Branstad, and Lieut. Gov. Kim Reynolds used their weekly news conference to focus on three years of the STEM initiative in Iowa. The governor said there are were over 3,000 classrooms, involving more than 100,000 students taking part in the initiative in the previous school year. “Every one of the STEM programs rolled out to educators across Iowa this past year has met or exceeded its objective of inspiring greater interest in STEM among students. That’s important because facts show that STEM careers pay, on average, $10 more per hour than non-STEM jobs, translating to average incomes of $58,800 versus $39,300 for all occupations,” Branstad said.

Along with the Indiana Department of Education, Eli Lilly and Company, and the Lilly Endowment, we are working to reform K-8 science education in Indiana through the Indiana Science Initiative (ISI). ISI started with the creation of Indiana’s Strategic Plan for Science Education Reform in December 2008 by a committee of K-12 educators, scientists, government agents, higher education faculty and led by the National Science Resources Center (now known as the Smithsonian Science Education Center).